Brick

For the sake of our own san­ity, let’s turn off the tele­vi­sions and Inter­net news, unless view­ing them is part of your job or you have a vital direct inter­est. Check back when facts are firmed up. May I sug­gest, this being early after­noon, check­ing the smart­phone, tablet or TV set about 4 p.m.

New­town, Conn.

If you can’t hold your­self back that far, then just check the news updates once an hour.

We’re gawk­ing. That’s tacky, and it’s low of us. Also, we’re not doing any­one any good, least of all our­selves. We are not help­ing those in the mid­dle of today’s cri­sis, either, by stand­ing on the street cor­ner with the crowd, behind the crime scene tape, watch­ing the ambu­lances come and go.

Today’s remarks are about the hor­rific mass shoot­ing by an armed loony of a grade school in Con­necti­cut. Link here to see the lat­est — but hourly, at the most fre­quent, right? We need san­ity, clear-headedness, calm.

There’s another rea­son: All of the facts aren’t in yet, I bet not even 20 per­cent of the ver­i­fi­able infor­ma­tion. All we are doing is fill­ing our heads with junk. And junk like this — par­tial sets of facts, con­jec­tures, assump­tions and hate — is hard to dis­lodge, even after solid data comes in. That is human nature.

Con­tin­u­ing cov­er­age news oper­a­tions are fill­ing the gaps with con­jec­ture. This is how CNN and the oth­ers oper­ate. The media are using experts, quot­ing them. But what do they know? They can’t know much. All this is exploit­ing we gawk­ers. If this was a nation­wide emer­gency, there’d be no com­mer­cials. See­ing com­mer­cials today? Yup.

When offi­cials who have been briefed or who have been on the scene come on the air, sure lis­ten to them as they’ll have hard facts. But they likely may hide per­ti­nent details as inves­ti­ga­tions are con­tin­u­ing. That is their oblig­a­tion. So there we are nearly where we started, an incom­plete sum­mary of facts that may be con­fus­ing and allow wrong con­clu­sions by their vague­ness. Besides being upset­ting. Lots of grown-ups across the coun­try are plenty wor­ried today.

I’m head­ing out for errands, and I expect to be hear­ing about this from strangers and friends. Tragedies like this bring us together. That’s good, it’s nec­es­sary. We are community.

I’ll lis­ten to folks, com­mis­er­ate but won’t share my own thoughts. Empa­thy counts. Yet what do I really know? Surely no more than you, out­side of know­ing to be patient at times like this.